This has not been the best winter in Australia. The world's driest continent remains in the grip of its worst drought in at least a century, with eminent scientists now warning of irretrievable loss to the country's wetlands, vegetation and some fish species, not to mention the potential devastating human toll if the hard rain doesn't fall soon.

But while Australia's growing academic consensus on the worsening weather is no laughing matter, some have found dark humour in the news that one of the country's leading scholarly journals has reported the world's first known case of "climate change delusion phenomenon".

The discovery, first reported in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, comes after local psychiatrists diagnosed the case in a 17-year-old apparently too guilt-stricken over his part in man-made global warming to drink water. The young man believed that his own consumption of water could further deplete supplies, leading to the deaths of millions.

Teenage depression might be no laughing matter, either, although that hasn't stopped those who believe pretty well everybody is deluded over climate-change making light of the discovery, which has since upped the mirth of conservative pundits, commentators and news organisations alike.

The latest to join the chorus even has an academic title: "Professor Schpinkee", the name given by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to its greenhouse calculator, which invites users to enter their carbon-using details to discover 'when you should die' as a consequence of your environmentally spendthrift ways.

A little joke, you will say, thunders Andrew Bolt, an Australian pundit who sees the calculator as anything but.

Trouble is, though, that there really is an insanely anti-human bent to deep green preaching on global warming, and there really are believers who feel only too keenly the planet is doomed by our sin, and humans must vanish.

Take the influential Gaia preacher Professor James Lovelock, whose latest book, The Revenge Of Gaia, calls for nine-tenths of humanity to vanish to 'save' the planet from warming.

Or hear the ABC's Ockham's Razor air a lecture by a former academic arguing we must "put something in the water, a virus that would be specific to the human reproductive system and would make a substantial proportion of the population infertile".

Not coincidentally, perhaps, Bolt was also the first mainstream columnist to bring news of the "climate change delusion phenomenon" and, chortles aside, it's something he clearly feels hot under the collar about. The bad news, of course, is that he and his water-strapped countrymen could yet feel a lot hotter before too long, and that won't be any delusion.